Koppie’s sustainable coffee innovation – summary
- Coffee has the third highest CO2 footprint after meat and cacao
- WWF links coffee to major tropical deforestation between 2005 and 2017
- Koppie creates bean-free coffee alternative using fermented chickpeas and peas
- Lifecycle assessment shows Koppie emits one kilogram CO2 per kilogram product
- Start-up plans 1,000 tonnes production by 2026 with hybrid coffee blends
Like many Belgians, Koppie co-founder Daan Raemdonck loves the daily ritual of coffee.
But, despite 10 years working at alternative milks manufacturer Alpro, most recently as its marketing director, he’d never realised that came at a significant cost to the environment.
“I came across a 2018 article from Oxford University that analysed the CO2 footprint of foods,” he remembers. “To my surprise, number one was meat, but number two was cacao and number three was coffee.
“That for me was eye-opening. I’d been working at Alpro, and so this topic matters to me, [but] I had expected cheese, yoghurt or milk to be next, and suddenly there’s cacao and coffee. That completely struck me.”
Curiosity piqued, Raemdonck began to take a closer look into the topic. “I quite quickly stumbled across the fact that there are some really big concerns around coffee, and specifically the supply of coffee going forward.” According to the WWF, for example, between 2005 and 2017 more than 80% of tropical deforestation was concentrated in just six commodities, including coffee.
Such concerns have already sparked a raft of ‘beanless’ blends, utilising plants like mushrooms, chicory and carob combined with caffeine to emulate the taste and aroma of classic coffee.
But for Raemdonck there was a clear gap in the market: “Most of these alternatives come in an instant form, and as a mainland European coffee drinker, that’s not coffee. I expect my coffee to be brewed fresh – there are very few alternatives that allow you to do that, and virtually none that allow you to create an espresso.
“So, I had this idea, there must be a better way to do this, right?”
Making a ‘moonshot’
Rather than create a blend, Raemdonck’s plan was to identify a single-ingredient alternative to the coffee bean, one that would look, taste and even behave in a similar way.
Too often, “we dig something up, we roast it and we sort of pray that it tastes like coffee. And then when clearly it doesn’t, we start adding